Women’s Political, Economic, and Social Lives in Muslim-Majority Countries

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Cross-country studies on women’s political lives see Islam as a key predictor of women’s participation in the public sphere. This panel emphasizes the heterogeneity across Muslim-majority countries. It includes four papers based in Turkey, Pakistan, and Morocco to understand key factors that shape women’s political lives. Together, the papers broaden the meaning of and explanations for women’s participation as both political citizens and political leaders. They emphasize the role of mobility, stigma, intersectional identities, and, more broadly, the substantial effect that social norms can have on women’s political engagement. In a literature where participation is often measured as a behavioral binary, the papers contribute by demonstrating the varied nature of political engagement and norms, culture, and context shape these various forms of interaction with the state.


In their paper titled, “The Urban Disadvantage: How Geography Shapes Women’s Turnout in Pakistan,” Cheema, Khan, Mohmand, and Rauf draw on fine-grained data from the 2018 National Elections in Pakistan, to a puzzle: despite higher education, greater agency and lower household dependency ratios, women in Pakistan's urban areas turnout to vote at lower rates than their rural counterparts. To explain this, they use survey data and field observation to develop an inductive place-based theory of women's voter turnout highlighting the role of mobilization, mobility, and preference divergence to help understand the “gendered urban disadvantage.” The paper demonstrates that the effects of urbanization on democratic participation are gendered in nature.

In a second paper titled, “Women’s Socialization, Work, and Politics: Evidence from Pakistan,” Adam-Rahman examines the conditions under which women’s labor force participation leads to political participation and agency. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the paper finds that in urban Pakistan, women’s work does not necessarily lead to political participation or agency. To reconcile conventional wisdom with this puzzling null finding, the author argues that previous studies of women's LFP do not account for women's socialization into work in patriarchal societies. In such societies, women are socialized from a young age to see participation in the labor force as men's work and as undesirable or stigmatized for women. The paper uses survey and interview evidence to argue that women's socialization, or how they are raised to think about work from a young age, profoundly shapes their political engagement and conditions the effect of LFP on their political engagement.


In their paper titled, “Gender and Perceived Electability in Morocco” Blackman, Barnett, and Shalaby use survey experiments in a nationally representative face-to-face survey of Moroccans to understand voters’ candidate preferences. They investigate whether a divergence between perceived and actual support for female candidates is associated with a lower willingness to vote for women in a patriarchal, authoritarian context. They argue that survey respondents prefer male to female candidates; that men perceive others as preferring male to female candidates; and that women perceive men as preferring male candidates and women as preferring female candidates. The paper also posits that respondents overall will express preferences closer to perceived male voter preferences, but that female respondents will express preferences closer to perceived female voter preferences. These results contribute to our understanding of perceived gender norms and second-order beliefs. The paper has important implications for the electoral success of women candidates.


The fourth paper on this panel is titled “Why Do (Male) Party Elites Nominate Women? Women’s Intersectional Identities and Strategic Party List Formation in Turkey.” In this paper, Sari-Genc and Benstead use an original dataset from Turkey’s parliamentary elections (2015-2023) and qualitative interviews with party elites to find that leaders strategically place women with politically salient intersecting identities in visible list positions. Party leaders are more likely to do this in districts where women’s intersecting identities are central to symbolic contestations between opposing partisan groups. The authors argue that leveraging women’s religious or ethnic identities creates informational shortcuts, fostering warmth among individuals from that in-group, who are more likely to see the female candidate as “one of their own.” The paper contributes to our understanding of gender and politics in patriarchal contexts.


Overall, our panel presents an opportunity for papers across various important country cases to engage in meaningful dialogue with each other.

Sub Unit

• Division 31: Women , Gender and Politics Research

Individual Presentations

• Women’s Socialization, Work, and Politics: Evidence from Pakistan - Natalya Adam-Rahman, Stanford University

• The Urban Disadvantage: How Geography Shapes Women’s Turnout in Pakistan - Ali Cheema, Lahore University of Management Sciences; Sarah Khan, American University-SIS; Shandana Khan Mohmand, Institute of Development Studies; Shanze Fatima Rauf, University of Pennsylvania

• Gender and Perceived Electability in Morocco - Carolyn Barnett, University of Arizona; Alexandra Domike Blackman, Cornell University; Marwa Shalaby, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Why Do (Male) Party Elites Nominate Women? - Elif Sari Genc, Portland State University; Lindsay J. Benstead, Portland State University

• Gender and Perceptions of Security Forces: Experimental Evidence from Iran - Roya Izadi, University of Rhode Island; Laura Huber, University of Mississippi

Chair

• Mai Omer Hassan MIT

Discussants

• Avital Livny University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

• Calvert W. Jones University of Maryland, College Park